A thread covering the basics of the BOLT rpg by @AjeyPandey, his own action-adventure, CC-BY-SA heartbreaker very loosely inspired by Genesys.

you can get it for $5 USD here https://ajeypandey.itch.io/the-bolt-rpg-engine-v021
I'll be looking at the v0.2.4 release, which is 104 US Letter-sized pages or a bit over 30,000 words. Some of this is pretty conversational play advice though -- the ruleset could be summarised in fewer words.
Bolt is a generalist, action-adventure rpg ruleset. It has more crunch than Maze Rats or even some D&D clones, but doesn't have a built-in setting beyond a couple of cursory examples related to character generation.
The main inspiration for the game is Genesys, particularly the "hack this game" attitude it claimed to have. Other cited inspirations are some trad games like Cyberpunk 2020 and D&D to PbtA games like Masks and Monster of the Week.
Unlike Genesys, it uses a set of standard polyhedral dice (the d20 and d% are unused), and instead of a murky rights situation, the text is all CC-BY-SA. So how interested would I be in using this as the basis for a game? Let's find out!
Setting/gameplay assumptions and design goals.

* PCs are adventurers (or hired guns, cyberpunk drifters, etc). Combat receives more detailed mechanics than interpersonal relationships, inventory management., or survival/wilderness crawls.
* Shallower power curve than D&D, at least with HP and damage.
* All skills are supposed to be useful, and magic-users don't have one power stat for all of their spells.
* Powergaming and finding combos is encouraged, as long as the *player spotlight* is balanced.
The ~gameplay loop~ is like most other RPGs. The GM describes the scene, players suggest character actions. The GM decides on a Difficulty, players roll, and the GM narrates the outcome.
Difficulty should usually be public knowledge, and the GM should be forthcoming with most information. Secret doors and the like are revealed by a passive Vigilance stat.

Some narrative authority is in the hands of players, if their characters have relevant skills.
Skill rolls should not be made for trivial tasks or if the action can be tried over and over without repercussions.

They should only be rolled if the GM has ideas for what success AND failure might look like. Failure should be "narratively interesting".
Solving mysteries, taking notes, and deductive reasoning are handled by player skill, not a character attribute. Everything else -- persuading, sneaking, searching the room -- is handled by an Attribute and Skill.
By default, a skill roll is:

[1d10 + Attribute + Skill] to determine success or failure,
and
1d4 to determine Perks or Complications.

If you roll equal or over the Difficulty, you succeed.
If the d4 is a natural 1, a Complication is generated, on a natural 4 a Perk is generated.

If you've played any of FFG's Star Wars or Genesys games you have a sense of what this means.
btw I'm not a fan of having Attributes *and* Skills, particularly if Skills are always rolled with a certain Attribute. But I fall outside the target audience for this ruleset in this respect, I think ;-)
A typical Difficulty should be whatever gives characters a 50:50 chance.

I think this table has an error in it though? the first row should start with +2.
Perks and Complications are side-benefits/hindrances.

Success with a Complication means you pick the lock, but leave evidence of tampering.

Failure with a Perk means you lose the assassin in the busy streets, but a magician sees your heroic effort and leaves her calling card.
Characters are fragile, so Complications should generally not be "take some damage".

Or if you can't think of something narrative, the character (or an ally) can get a bonus/penalty to their next roll.
Instead of modifiers or advantage/disadvantage, situational bonuses/penalties are handled by stepping the d10 up or down to different die types. This is called Pulling Forward and Setting Back.
Multiple instances of either can stack, and they cancel stack and cancel each other out 1:1, up to a maximum of +/- 2 stages. Since a d20 would be a really large boost over a d12 and a d14 is a pretty rare die, BOLT instead has you roll d8+d6.
(Hmm, I'll have to see if there's any margin of success mechanic that the nonuniform distribution of d8+d6 might mess up. Should be a rare enough situation to really matter though)
Is this better than advantage/disadvantage, flat modifiers, or the Boons & Banes of Shadow of the Demon Lord?

It's largely a matter of preference. I prefer a single die type for rolls, because I play with people who confuse octahedrons with pentagonal trapezohedrons.
Helping or hindering another character's action gives them one Pull Forward or Set Back, as appropriate. You don't have to roll to help/hinder, you simply do so.

But if a Perk or Consequence happens, your character becomes the recipient of said Perk or Consequence. Nice touch.
Rolls opposed in-fiction by an NPC can be handled as either a static difficulty (6 + either the NPC's relevant Attribute or their relevant Skill) or with the GM and player rolling for their respective characters.
The latter is recommended both for significant, non-mook adversaries (the game calls them Heels ^_^ ), and for situations like lobbing a grenade at a mob of mooks. Having them all succeed or all fail based on their identical stats would seem weird.

Ties always go to the PC.
All characters have a stat called Tenacity. It's like your "mental duress HP", but can also be spent 1:1 to add a bonus to a roll *after* the result is known. This is a nice risk-reward mechanic and a way to manage "miss by 1" feel-bad moments.
All characters (at least, those with statblocks) have Tenacity, but it's unclear if NPCs can spend it to improve rolls.
There's also an optional metanarrative currency, here called Luck Tokens.

Unlike FATE, they're not used to alter a roll's odds of success or its result after the fact. Tenacity does that for players, and a GM can just fiat the Difficulty to whatever they want.
In each *scene*, the players collectively start with 2 Luck Tokens, and the GM starts with 1. None are added or lost, only exchanged. Players spend a token to add some convenient plot twist or coincidence, GMs spend it to introduce inconvenient twists.
Characters have six Core Attributes. There's a table of Attributes and their associated Skills that mentions a seventh attribute, Attunement, used for magic. But I assume this is an accidental holdover? It's mentioned nowhere else in the rules, and contradicts a design goal.
The Core Attributes are: Fortitude, Reflex, Knowledge, Acuity, Willpower, and Charisma.

Fortitude is everything Str and Con do in D&D, including modifying Vitality.

Reflex covers *most* of what Dex does in D&D: ranged attacks, sneaking, acrobatics, dodging, piloting/riding.
Acuity is all the perception/insight/survival/streetwise stuff that Wis does in D&D (depending on edition). Interestingly this also includes cheating and stealing, as well as jury-rigging stuff.

Willpower gives you extra Tenacity, and affects coercion and resisting coercion.
Knowledge is the coolest one here. It covers the specialist fields you'd expect: surgery, computing, manipulating magic items. But it also has a bunch of Recall skills, that unlike D&D's lore skills explicitly put narrative authority in the hands of the player.
e.g. if you have ranks in Recall(Law) you can just say (with a roll)

"I've read that this city punishes pickpocketing by magically turning you into a hamster" rather than milking the GM for something relevant.
I say this requires a roll, but the text is really unclear what the difference between a success and a fail is here.
Charisma is the schmoozing stat: charming, deceiving, inspiring, etc. Also it has Recall(People), so have fun with your narrative authority over what your last interaction with the prince was like.
Derived Attributes include:
* Vitality (i.e. HP) is 8 + Fortitude.

* Defense (i.e. armour class) is 6 + Reflex.

* Vigilance (i.e. passive Perception) is 6 + Acuity.

* Tenacity (i.e. "social HP", also used to change fails into successes) is 8 + Willpower.
* Wealth is between 1 (a pauper) and 10 (Tony Stark). It's basically up to table consensus what ballpark PCs' Wealth should be in and whether outliers are allowed.
I don't get why Wealth is listed under Derived Attributes. The other DAs can be improved by spending XP, and Wealth is unmodified by any core Attribute.
Anyway, accounting is easy in this game. The GM sets a price value between 0 and 10 for an object. if the Price is "much less" than your Wealth, you can get it trivially. If it's close to your Wealth, you can get it with some narrative complication.
If it's "much more" than your Wealth, you can't buy it.

"much" isn't defined here, probably deliberately. I'd go with +/- 2.
Character Creation

First you generate your Core Attributes, then you choose a Background (akin to species, ancestry, culture) and Role (akin to class or playbook). Some settings might also have Specialisations (i.e. subclasses).
I'm not sure how to read Attribute generation. All of them start at 1, and you get 5 points to spend, 1:1.

You can't raise an attribute above 5. You can lower an Attribute to 0 or below to get extra points.

What I don't get is if you're allowed to lower multiple attributes.
Core Attributes are never modified by your Background, but can be modified by your Role.

Not a fan of this -- just give players more points to spend during Attribute generation

Unless the implication is that your Role can boost an Attribute above the cap of 5?
*Regardless of your Knowledge score*, you get 1-3 native languages (your choice) and 4 ranks in their relevant Speak/Read skills.

This is good, characters should not be nerfed because they came from a multilingual household.
Non-native languages like liturgical Latin or Quenya are Knowledge skills, as you'd expect.

Your Background and Role (and Specialisation, if used) give you ranks in additional skills. Role, or Specialisation, also determines starting equipment.
Backgrounds, Roles and Specialisations also give you a total of four Incentives.

These are how you earn XP. They're yes/no questions. You check three of them after each scene, the fourth after each combat.
e.g. a scene Incentive might be "did I cheat to gain an advantage" or "did I accomplish a great feat of strength".

A combat incentive might be "did I make a strategy beforehand".
Checking after each scene might be too frequent for me? I can see it slowing down scene transitions a lot, and pushing play too far toward always trying to trigger XP. I'd houserule this to each session.

Otherwise it's some solid XP rules, and the pregenerated ones are great.
Backgrounds and Roles are formatted like multiple-choice quizzes.

Would you rather +1 WILL or +1 CHA?

A Shakespearian level of skill in your native languages, or an extra language you picked up in your travels?

+1 Tenacity or to start with healing magic?
An example Scholar role for a fantasy campaign.

(obviously this is a beta and could use some layout love)
There's some advice about what makes a good Background and Role. Good Roles don't immediately typecast the character. A "Ranger" makes you think of Aragorn. But a "Wanderer" could be Aragorn, a pilgrim, a skald, or a soul-hunter.
Good Backgrounds *definitely* don't pigeonhole characters into pastiches or stereotypes of real-world ethnicities. A catfolk background shouldn't mean you're a caravan traveler adept at lying and stealing, Bethesda.
If your setting *does* use real human ethnicities as Backgrounds, consider moving the majority of Background skill ranks over to Role. Backgrounds and Roles don't all have to be uniformly formatted, or of equal "power level" in total skill ranks or attribute adjustments.
This is all solid advice, and I'm pretty on board with it all.

Next time, combat structure and the example magic system!
Combat (or other encounters where every second counts) are structured like most RPGs: in Rounds, during which every character has a single Turn.

During your Turn you get up to three Actions: movement, attacking, aiming, defending, interacting with an object, drawing a sword...
At the start of the round, declare how many actions you plan to take (you don't have to commit to what they are). This determines Initiative for that round.

Everyone taking 1 action goes first, then everyone taking 2 actions, then everyone taking 3.
PCs act before NPCs in their bracket, i.e. no initiative ties or simultaneous actions. Fast and easy to resolve, but not without some issues.

If there's an explicit statement that you can't attack twice in a turn, I can't spot it? I assume that's the intent based on design goals
If you take multiple actions that suggest a roll, it's suggested to compress them into one roll.

e.g. you and an opponent are duelling on a rickety beam. Instead of two rolls, Strike(Melee) and Balance, the GM has you make a Strike(Melee) roll with a single Set Back.
Range and distance are treated as abstract Zones. You can move to an adjacent zone as an action. If you're in the same Zone as another character, you can move in or out of melee engagement with them as an action.
This is where some issues arise.

To compare, if you move out of melee in D&D, the opponent gets an opportunity attack in addition to their normal turn in the initiative order. There are ways to avoid that, depending on edition (Shift, Disengage, Tumble checks, fighting retreats)
If you move *into* melee, there's no opportunity attack unless the opponent has a spear braced or some bullshit feat.

In BOLT, there are no "out of turn order" attacks. Who strikes first is based on number of declared actions.
Say you're in a fistfight and want to escape & run out the door to the next Zone. That's two actions, so if the guy you're fighting only declared one action, he'll get to punch you before you move.
If he planned on two actions, you'll get to escape before he gets to attack, and he'll have to decide on something else with his actions.

I like this so far, you can declare more actions at a risk of the situation changing and ruining your plans.
But if I use my one action to "brace a spear to attack someone I think is going to charge me", then i'm acting *before* the opponent moves.

Read strictly, I can't do this. They're not yet in melee range when I take my turn!

In practice, I would handwave this to work, of course
The other bug with this initiative system is that there's no guidance on in what order, or with what information, players nominate the amount of actions they intend to take. Is it a simultaneous reveal, or do we take turns? This gives whoever declares last a big advantage.
Bugs aside, this avoids the boring 3e/4e/5e "clockwork initiative", but gives players more control that the random chit pull system of Troika or the "reroll every round" of most OSR games.

I like leaving initiative to chance, but not everyone does, so this system is great.
Attack rolls are a kind of skill check.

Weapons deal a static amount of damage on a successful hit, e.g. a meat cleaver deals 3 + Fort, a crossbow just deals 6.

Recall that PCs have Vitality equal to 8 + Fort, so on average they can be hit twice before serious consequence.
Goons have 1 Vitality, like 4e D&D minions. More significant NPCs have 8 + Fort, just like PCs, though the GM can set Fort to whatever they like.

You're not dead when you hit 0 Vitality though, or even out for the combat. Goons are though ;-)
Armour reduces incoming damage. Light armour reduces by 1, heavy by 2. Partial cover gives you 5 Armour and applies a Set Back to incoming ranged attacks. Total cover gives 10 Armour (!) and two Set Backs.
Weapons can have various tags like Armour Piercing X (ignore X points of armour), or Bulky which Pulls Back certain rolls. Some tags have unique rules, like laying down suppressive fire or spending generated Perks to stun an enemy.
Tags like Subtle or Concealable operate purely on shared fiction. Others have no intrinsic rules, but some PC abilities may reference weapons with the tag.

Conditions like prone, grappled, etc give Pulls Forward and Set Backs to various actions.
If your Vitality is reduced to 0 or less, you Go Down.

On your next turn, you make an Endure roll (a Willpower-based skill). If you succeed, you get back up with some Vitality. On a fail, you're down for the fight, but can drag yourself to safety.
Either way, you mark a Wound after the roll. After the fight, you recover to 1 Vitality.

Each Wound applies a -1 penalty to your rolls, and you automatically fail all rolls once you have three of them.
Wounds also give +2 to the Difficulty of Endure rolls, meaning they're applied as a modifier twice.

Also I thought Pull Back/Set Forward was supposed to replace small modifiers?

Possibly the rules could be tidied here.
yes I know D&D 5e uses advantage/disadvantage for most circumstantial modifiers, but then gives +2 AC for being behind cover. This isn't intrinsically bad, there's some leeway to have both if the situation calls for it. In 5e's case, they wanted cover to stack with disadvantage.
PCs *cannot die* without their player's consent. Being defeated in combat should generally raise the narrative stakes in a way other than character death.
What if you changed this rule to, say, you die on a failed Endure roll

Well, the fact that PCs can spend Tenacity to boost rolls (including Endure rolls) means that there's quite a bit of space between "oh shit, combat's going south" and "oh shit, my character's dead".
Unless they blew Tenacity to succeed on earlier rolls, in which case, them's the breaks ;-)
Bad stuff also happens if you run out of Tenacity. You Lose It, which can be anything narratively appropriate that raises the stakes: surrendering, cowering in a corner, pulling a gun in a nonviolent situation, etc. After Losing It, you mark a Wound, and Tenacity resets to 3.
Healing is limited. A potion/adrenaline needle can only be used after you Go Down, giving you an automatic success on your Endure roll.

First Aid restores some Vitality and can be done anytime, but only once a Scene. It's a skill roll.
A nice aspect of First Aid is that generated Perks and Consequences heal/damage the patient's Tenacity. So you might heal them, but cause them to Lose It.

I like the subtle differences and interplay between physical and mental stress in this ruleset.
You can roll to recover some Tenacity after each Encounter.

You automatically recover some Tenacity and Vitality between Scenes, depending on the level of care you receive.

You completely replenish both after each Act (i.e. adventure, or every few sessions).
Overall, this is a combat ruleset that I like. Some minor issues that call for rulings-over-rules or fiction-first handwaves, but that's not a problem for me.
I like that damage and Vitality don't scale much (i'll get into XP later) and that hitting 0 Vitality still has some bite, even when PC death remains in the narrative control of the player.

*glares at 5th edition*
Not much left to cover -- XP, some GM-facing advice and rules, the prototype rules for Life Magic, a few odds and ends I missed earlier.
Also, v0.2.5 has just dropped, so some of the problems I mentioned above have already been fixed. Also there's the option to just use +/-1 modifiers instead of changing die sizes when Pulling Forward/Setting Back a roll.

The rest of this readthrough will be v0.2.5.
OK, so XP. This game doesn't use levels. As mentioned above, you gain XP by playing to your Incentives. You get your Incentives during chargen from a shortlist provided by your Background and Role.

The game expects you to earn 2-4 XP per scene.
You then directly spend XP to improve an Attribute, Skill, or to gain a new Feat or talent tree ability. Obviously, raising an Attribute costs more than a Skill.

XP costs range from 3 XP to raise a skill with few ranks or pick a minor feat or talent...
...to 5 XP to get the first ability in a new Talent Tree or increase a Derived Attribute (Defense, Vitality, Tenacity or Vigilance),

to 8 XP to raise a Core Attribute, major feat or talent, or to increase a Skill that already has lots of ranks.
It's implied that skills, just like core attributes, cap at 5 points each? So without getting into Pulling Back/Setting Forward, that *just* covers the full range of a d10.

So at a casual reading, this *should* allow more variance in to-hit than a typical 5e D&D party
where unless the wizard or cleric deliberately take no offensive cantrips, they can at-will attack with a % to hit in the same ballpark as a fighter.
But unlike splatbook-heavy 3.5 D&D or some more open-ended level-less systems, it's unlikely a non-combat character in BOLT will be *unable to hit* an enemy balanced for the rest of the party

(they might be better off helping another character rather than taking potshots though)
The game has Feats. Some Feats build on previous ones, but there's no complicated Attribute or Skill prerequisites like in 3.5 or Pathfinder.

(if you *like* complicated trees of prerequisites, there's Talent Trees)
Feats are arranged into three Levels, but this just reflects their XP cost -- nothing stops you saving up XP to take a Level 3 feat as your new-ish character's first improvement.
Feats are how this game implements two-weapon fighting. The first one in the chain lets you roll a single attack with two Set Backs. On a Success *or* a Perk, one weapon deals damage. On a Success *and* Perk, both do.
I definitely prefer this over the "make two attack rolls" approach of wotc-era D&D.

Feats are also how you reflect your character joining an in-world faction.
If you do, you get access to a skill for navigating that faction's politics, and one of your Incentives changes to reflect that faction's goal.

Follow-up feats give you a higher rank in the faction, eventually becoming a ringleader.
They also give little subrules/moves for rolling Navigate(Organisation) to requisition equipment or aid. Again, fail-forward. Perhaps on a fail it costs them some standing or requires a massive favour in exchange.
This is... fine. I'm not a big fan of spending XP to reflect your changing position in an organisation -- that should be based on your actions. But since you also *gain* XP from actions that further the organisation's goals, the game fiction still influences your PC's powers.
It's also easy to pick out some feats and spin them off into subsystems that are purely leveled-up by in-world actions, as opposed to spending XP.

The 2nd-level "Agent" receives the most fleshing out though -- more guidance for the final "Ringleader" feat would be welcome.
Most of the feats are combat-related. A couple of the noncombat ones give you little Apocalypse World-esque moves. e.g. this "Scoping the Joint" feat lets you ask two questions from a list on a Success, or three on a Success and Perk.
And this "Rig to Blow" feat, with the same setup of pick 2 on Success, 3 on Success+Perk.
The prototype Life Magic tree works pretty similarly to Feats - pay XP to get access to a little subrule - just arranged as a tech tree.

No spell slots. Some magic is at-will, but requires a skill roll to succeed. Other magic costs some resource every PC has, like Tenacity.
This Skill is unique to that tree, i.e. if you research multiple trees, you'll have different skill ranks for each of them, and those skills are keyed to different Core Attributes.

Some of the Life Magic abilities don't call for a roll though.
e.g. Still lets you automatically give some Tenacity to a target who has just run out, stopping them from Losing It.

Transfusion just lets you donate Vitality to a target.

Healing Brew lets you make Healing Shots equal to your number of ranks in Medicine in between each Scene.
If you like tech trees, this is fine. If you don't -- why should I have to know how to take others' pain into myself before learning how to summon zombies? -- break them up into Feats.

I do like the actual effort put into making sure magical healing doesn't obsolete Medicine.
Also this game takes a strong "magic and technology are basically the same thing in an RPG" stance, so cyberpunk hacking rules and the like can be expected to work the same way as this Life Magic tree.
I think just NPCs and some of the GMing advice to go?
OK back to finish this thread.

NPC stats.
As mentioned before, there's no initiative stat -- when you go in combat is based on how many actions you declare.

Goons are the simplest. Go Down in one hit like a 4e D&D Minion, a bonus to-hit and a static difficulty for social rolls.
I like that the text points out that despite being *mechanically* cannon fodder, they're still *people*. And perhaps they don't die when Going Down, they just retreat because they're not being paid enough.

Goons don't have Tenacity to spend on flubbed rolls.
Faces are your minibosses and minor allies. Their six Core Attributes and four Derived Attributes should all be defined.

They have more mechanical texture than Goons, but like Goons, cannot burn Tenacity or roll to Endure when they run out of Vitality.
Heels (is this wrestling terminology correct? i thought faces were the good guys and heels the bad?) are your big bosses.

They're built like a PC, can spend Tenacity, the GM should make them OP and bend some rules with them.
Even if they *would* Go Down, they have *just enough* plot armour to get one final action, cheesy monologue, or showdown with the heroes off first.

It doesn't matter how fast you can cast that Banish spell, the archdemon will always be able to hit the Big Red Button first.
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